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We are delighted to welcome Dr Annette-Carina van der Zaag (Goldsmiths) speaking on ‘The promise of vaginal microbicides: materialities of sex in a time of HIV’ (abstract below).

This paper provides a feminist theorisation of the development of vaginal microbicides, female-initiated HIV prevention methods predominantly designed as gels and rings that women can insert vaginally before having sex to protect themselves against HIV infection. Currently, vaginal microbicides are being tested in clinical trials and have been since the early 1990s, with mixed and at times controversial results. The development of vaginal microbicides is a global health response to the rising number of HIV infections amongst women, particularly prominent in sub-Saharan Africa, and is aimed at women’s empowerment in the fight against HIV. Besides providing physical protection against the virus, advocates understand microbicides to provide women with a prevention method they can control in sexual practices where they lack the power to demand male condom use. I argue that the promise of vaginal microbicides is remarkable because it entangles the physiological receptivity of vaginal skin and the cervix to the HIV virus with the transformation of socio-sexual power relations – the promise of vaginal microbicides is a posthuman promise of human/nonhuman relationality. But what happens to feminist ideals of empowerment when they materialise through biomedical practice? Building on feminist neomaterialisms (a theoretical field focused on the materiality of bodies and the constitutive effects of science and technology) and Karen Barad’s agential realism in particular, I argue that there is a fundamental ambiguity between the promise of vaginal microbicides as it initially emerged through women’s health advocacy and the effects of biomedical process – its practices and imaginaries – that have taken the field to where it stands at present. This ambiguity matters for the microbicide/woman that emerges from the field as the configuration of its potential user and thus the empowerment a microbicide is able to promise.

We are grateful to the Institute for Development Studies for allowing us to use the IDS Convening Space for this event. Directions available at http://www.ids.ac.uk/visiting-ids